The Surakarta Part 1

THE SURAKARTA

I

MR. HEREFORD ENTERTAINS A STRAINGER FROM JAVA

In appearance the offices which bore the name of the "Regan Estate—Wade Hereford, Administrator"—were only ordinary Chicago business offices. Business men, stenographers, clerks and boys, whose affairs took them past the neatly lettered doors of these offices, failed to differentiate them in any interesting way from those suites on either side.

Those whose affairs took them on the other ​side of the heavy doors noted nothing unusual. The suite by its location in the most desirable corner of an upper floor of one of Chicago's newest and tallest buildings, was removed almost entirely from the noises of the street. Heavy rugs stifled all sound of footsteps; the furniture, of massive design and deeply upholstered in leather, received or parted with a burden without a sound. Nothing in these rooms or in Hereford himself—imperturbable, carefully dressed, a little over thirty and member of all the city's best clubs—denoted how frequently, though at irregular and unforseen intervals, complications had been projected there from the furthest corners of the world to disturb the serenity of the office and of Hereford alike.

Wade Hereford—early in the thirty months since Matthew Regan, the packer, ​had left him sole executor of his estate—had learned to carry a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars subject to the immediate call of the only heir, Lorine.

More than once a demand for double this amount—additional to the regular monthly allowance—had tumbled out upon his desk, without warning, from the morning's mail. So long as these drafts upon him did not exceed in any twelve months the income from the estate, the executor had nothing to say. When they did Hereford had learned his second lesson—though not so promptly as his first—to protest in no more personal terms than:

Miss Lorine Regan, Peking—Mombasa, Cairo, Constantinople, or wherever she felt the need of money.

Dear Madam: The present value of ​the industrial stocks, bonds, real estate and other income-bearing principal property left you by your father is $8,540,000. This, invested at an average a trifle under seven per cent—for which all items will be sent you upon your request—bears income for this year of $597,000. Of this, a total of $536,000 has already been placed at your disposal. The balance of sixty-one thousand dollars—$61,000—is therefore all I am empowered to place to your immediate use, except in the event of any of those extraordinary exigencies provided for in your father's will.

There was nothing surprising, therefore, in her letter of this morning. Yet Hereford, having read with distinct uneasiness her curt notification to deposit one hundred and fifty ​thousand dollars to her check, put it aside unanswered.

Still more than that was due her. Its amount could be more than accounted for by preparation for another hunting party from Mombasa to Cairo; or by return of curiosity as to—and therefore the immediate and complete excavation of—the site of some early Assyrian city on whose mounds she might have lunched; or by another attempt—as in that one delirious month when the executor had learned that comment upon his ward's actions was forbidden—to break the bank of a fashionable European gambling place. Another turbine yacht would account for it; another private aeroplane plant, any one of a dozen more such caprices as these; though he knew, however, it would be none of these things which he called ​specifically to mind, for he had learned thoroughly that his ward never repeated.

Yet it was not the certainty it would be something different that caused Hereford to frown now. It was the knowledge that this new caprice, whatever it might be, was evidently about to be carried out in his vicinity.

Hereford stared for many minutes over the city roofs, and slightly flushed as he comprehended that his ward, for the first time in his knowledge of her—which so far had been entirely by letter—had honored her source of income with a visit; for the hotel address to which he was to acknowledge receipt of her instructions was one in the city.

This proximity, with its promise of embarrassing complications for himself, made him anxious to learn her purpose in coming ​here. Whereas usually he held off and put to as much trouble as possible those coming to him on any business connected with his ward, he now instructed to have sent in at once the man whose card, engraved "James Annis," inscribed "Concerning Miss Lorine Regan," he had found upon his desk.

Old Matthew Regan—roughly powerful in mind and body—with the perspicacity that marked all he did, had chosen well the executor of his estate in favor of his daughter. On matters concerning her, impostors, swindlers and get-rich-quick individuals from the four quarters of the world invaded Hereford's office. The atmosphere of even the outer office chilled and discouraged them. Their carefully prepared stories began to disintegrate long before they had penetrated as far as Hereford himself. He, on his part, ​treated every stranger as an impostor until he had proved himself otherwise. Matthew Regan had known the world and his daughter both too well to select as his executor a man of pleasant and agreeable manners, but Hereford was a strong man who did things by direct methods. He had got so he could classify and frustrate scheming strangers as they entered his door.

But he could not classify the man who entered with a swinging step in answer to his summons. An American—sallow-skinned, lithe, with sun-bleached hair and brows—Hereford guessed he had spent many years away from the States. He saw by the careful grooming and new clothes that Annis had prosperous pockets now at least. He divined that Annis had spent more than a little of his life where one ​preserves life itself only by alertness of mind and quickness of eye and hand.

The stranger took the seat Hereford had not offered him.

"I am on my way to New York from Java, Mr. Hereford," Annis explained. "I have been living in Java for the past six years. I was in Samarang when Miss Regan—who, I am told, is your ward—was there last year."

Hereford, looking steadily at him, said nothing.

"On the possibility that you have not been informed of the position into which Miss Regan put herself at that time I have dropped in to see you, as I believe—having observed what I have—is the duty of a gentleman."

"That is a phrase open to many ​constructions, Mr.—Annis." Hereford was studiously affronting.

"That——?"

"The duty of a gentleman."

If the man was, as he professed to be, an ally he failed to notice the insult; if he was an opponent he was worth heeding, for he did not flush. "I will hear what you have to say," Hereford decided promptly. "I am, as you seem to be informed, the executor of the late Matthew Regan's estate. My responsibility, however, is confined to financial affairs. His daughter was already of age when her father died. I am merely administrator of her estate. Miss Regan put herself into no position in Java regarding which she found it necessary to consult me as administrator."

"Then you have not heard of her ​engagement to the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta?"

Hereford's eyes did not waver. The man might be merely trying to catch him. Who—he asked himself—was the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta?

"I thought so!" Annis nodded; he glanced round to see that the door through which he had entered was shut. "So you've really heard nothing at all of this?"

"You may assume so," Hereford granted unwillingly.

Annis smiled his satisfaction.

"Therefore you have had no reason particularly to investigate Javan society as yet. Am I right?"

"You mean I do not know who the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta is? Again you may assume so if you wish."

"I can tell you that much very briefly. ​Java, as of course you know, is one of the largest and it is by far the most populous and prosperous of the East Indies. It has a population of over thirty million Javanese proper, the Sudanese and the Madurese—all three brown men, of course, of Malay stock. Java soil is said to be the richest in the world, and before Java was taken over as a colony the native sultans were among the most luxurious and absolute rulers in the world. When the Dutch took over the island and began to govern it they had often to leave the native rulers alone. Gradually seventeen of the sultanates have been formed into what the Dutch call residencies, with a Dutch resident as ruler or adviser to the native ruler; but in two sultanates—those of Surakarta and Jokjakarta—the native sultans still govern under only the most formal supervision of ​the Dutch resident. The Soesoehoenan of Surakarta is one of these—the richest native ruler in Java, by far the most independent and powerful; most despotic and absolute in his sultanate, and by far the most interesting. He has no less than ten thousand servants in his palace and his palace walls are four miles about. He is an Oxford graduate of some six or seven years ago, I believe—that is, he is about thirty years old. He is an excellent oarsman, tennis and cricket player; and is also a most skillful and daring automobile driver. Before I left he was going in for aëronautics with a biplane and a monoplane."

"You're his ardent biographer, Mr. Annis."

"No; for I'm going to give you the reverse of his picture too. The last time I saw him ​he was taking part in a Mohammedan ceremony—in his native costume, which does not include trousers; and his harem now numbers upward of a hundred and fifty women—Malay, Hindu, European, black, white and black-and-tan."

"And you have dropped in to tell me that my ward, Miss Regan, has engaged to add herself to those?"

"Not at all; but she has engaged to marry him if he will give them up—including Alarna, his favorite and reigning wife; provided, also, he takes from Alarna and sends to Miss Regan the great emerald known as the Surakarta, as proof of it all. All of which he has done."

"I don't quite follow you now."

"I can't tell you everything from first ​hand, but I believe Miss Regan came to Java eight months ago?"

"You are asking me for information now."

"No; the exact date is of no importance. She was with a party of English—army people, I believe, who had just been to India. Most respectable people too—you understand, there was not even talk of a scandal about her."

Hereford put his hand briskly toward a bell.

Annis checked him.

"I understand—not even mention of the word scandal with that implication in connection with Miss Regan's name. Quite right, too, Mr. Hereford, since I understand she has always avoided scandal of that sort at least. They all went together to visit the Soesoehoenan. It seemed one of the men in ​the party knew him at Oxford. He entertained them all, I understand, in the most extravagant manner for a month or so. He, I have gathered from fair reports, at least interested Miss Regan. She shot with him, beat him at tennis, took him up and showed him how to volplane down in his machine. He seems to have dared her, I might say, to marry him. She agreed to do it if he would give up all his wives, including Alarna, and take from Alarna and—if he still wished her, Miss Regan, rather than all the rest after six months—send to her to keep absolutely the great Surakarta as his pledge. It is, as any lapidarist can tell you, the most remarkable and by far the largest and most valuable emerald in the world. It is, indeed, invaluable—clear, without flaw and, cut in perfect star contour, larger than a man's fist. ​But, more than its money value, it has represented for centuries the honor of the ruling family of Surakarta. It is a sort of palladium, the possession of which is the superstitious hold over the sultan's people. A pretender, possessing it, could soon overturn the Soesoehoenan and put himself on the throne. The sending of this stone to Miss Regan, therefore, is the most absolute pledge of his sincerity possible. In giving it to her he puts himself absolutely into her hands. If—as may be her plan—she keeps it in her possession at some bank or other safe place to which she may have access, at the first suspicion of disloyalty to her she need only give it to the sultan's cousin to seat him in the sultan's place, or turn it over to the Dutch for them to take from him his power; or she could ruin him in a dozen other ways. ​That is what the sending of the emerald means. And Miss Regan's receiving of it tomorrow means that she will marry him—will become the wife of this Malay, Mr. Hereford."

Hereford scrutinized him with narrowed eyes.

"The sending of this—receiving it—tomorrow?" he questioned. "What do you mean?"

The traveler, seeing that at last he had made his impression, struck the desk.

"I mean that the emerald is here—the Soesoehoenan's envoys have it here at this moment at the Hotel Tonty. Tomorrow morning they will deliver it to your ward; and she will take it and formally betroth herself to the Soesoehoenan—unless you prevent it."

​"Of course you are quite disinterested in coming to tell me this—quite disinterested, Mr. Annis? They always are," Hereford said unpleasantly.

"I learned these facts in Java, as I said; and being on my way to New York I believed it only the part of a countryman of Miss Regan's to make sure that whoever was protecting her knew them too. I believed you might consider it your duty to interfere. If I have made a mistake and wasted my time I beg your pardon."

Hereford considered that a man living long among inferior and despised races—holding, perhaps, his memory of American women as an ideal—would undoubtedly act as Annis had just done.

"But if these are facts," he said uneasily, "why have I heard nothing of them? Less ​than this about Miss Regan has deeply interested the newspapers before now."

"The sultan, without doubt—if for considerations of safety alone—would conceal the fact that the suite he is sending here has with it the emerald. Miss Regan, perhaps, has too good a sense of a news sensation to allow anything to leak out prematurely."

Hereford's suspicions returned.

"You wish to leave me your address—or do you not?" he questioned caustically. "They sometimes leave an address—more often not."

"I intend to set out for New York this afternoon. If you wish I will send you my hotel from there."

He rose, waiting apparently for Hereford to rise too. The executor looked steadily at him and did not get up.

​Hereford, as the other closed the door behind him, pushed a button.

"Mr. James Annis, who is just leaving here, expects to take a train this afternoon for New York," he directed. "I'd be glad to know for certain whether he does take that train. You understand? Be quick or you may lose sight of him!"

Nevertheless, for several minutes he sat scowling at the door through which Annis had gone, as though he expected the traveller to return—often other persons had pretended to leave in this way only to come back almost at once and betray the real motives in their stories by their demands for money. When fully five minutes had passed and no other sound had followed the double closing of the outer office door which had marked Annis' departure and that of the boy ​he had sent after him, Hereford swung his chair around uneasily.

Hereford of late had begun to flatter himself that in connection with Lorine Regan nothing could surprise him; but now he had been thoroughly surprised.

Plainly there were two things to be done immediately—a telephone call to the hotel his ward had given as her address, and another call to the Hotel Tonty, where the stranger had said the Javanese were staying. One of these told him that a party of Javanese gentlemen had registered late the evening before, about whom the management of the Hotel Tonty knew or would tell nothing; the other that Miss Regan had just arrived.

But it was quite impossible—considering the strained relations between himself and ​his ward—to go direct to Lorine with this fantastic story, of which he had no more evidence than the narrative of a total stranger. The mere mention of it, if there was no truth behind it at all, would be an insult which might destroy forever the influence, slight as it was, that he had been able to maintain over her.

Hereford went to the closet and got his hat.

The best thing obviously was a visit to Max Schimmel.

II

MAX SCHIMIMEL

Not many men knew enough, as did Hereford, to visit Max Schimmel when confronted by something that perplexed and bewildered them. Those who did found that to Max nothing was strange, very little was perplexing. If somewhere, sometime, he had not encountered the precise situation that disturbed his questioner he had seen some one else encounter and had helped some one else to overcome it.

Max occupied the second floor, which otherwise could not have been rented at all, of a two-story frame building belonging to the Regan estate. This frame building, ​falling into decay, was almost in the heart of the business district on property left unimproved by Hereford for business reasons. Besides the second floor, Max had the use of half the yard.

He was in this yard, which with carefully nurtured shrubs and vines he had converted into a garden, when Hereford found him. Beside him a stump-tailed Gila lizard in a little glass cage basked comfortably in the warm October sun, and at his feet a strange crimson-striped fish, which Hereford had not seen before, with long, featherlike fins streaked purple and crimson, flopped in a glass trough; but Max's attention was entirely absorbed by a tiny clay pot boasting one white sweet pea. He was measuring this sweet pea across and across with a fine wire ​scale so earnestly that he did not notice the entrance of his friend.

There was mystery about Max. Clerks, stenographers and business men often stopped their work to look down in perplexed curiosity from their high windows at him and his dwelling. They wondered who he was and what he did; but the bushy-haired little man, with a scarred, perpetually tanned face, ignored these looks. In his life nothing was definite since his birth in Schleswig-Holstein except his presence at Gravelotte, where he was lamed in his right knee. Exactly as in India and China Max had dwelt in the farthest inland and most inaccessible villages, as in Africa and Borneo he had disappeared in the most impenetrable jungles, so here in civilization he had elected to dwell where civilization was fully represented and men ​were found twelve thousand to the acre. Yet he seemed as unaware of the presence of these men as he was of Hereford, now that he stood beside him.

"Put it down, Max," Hereford directed. "I have something important to ask you."

Max only adjusted his scale more intently, recognizing the voice, but not turning his head.

"Ach! Imbortant!" he exclaimed. "It must be that some one is about to lose or to make money then; for that iss what beople here think iss imbortant. But what iss imbortant iss—this." He pointed to the sweet pea.

"Dangerous variety, Max?"

"Why not? Would it be imbossible to give to this sweet pea the poison of the Borgias? But then this pea would become an ​exception—therefore unimbortant. Wait but a minute now and I will tell you whether—if you had an ancestor with too long a shankbone, let us say, back in the time of Rameses—your children may be gawky with that same long shank; or whether—so far as now iss proved—our forevaters only so far back as Cleopatra can so determine our shanks. See, this which I measure we may call the shank of this flower; it iss one hundred and fifty generations of this flower back or three thousand human years—that only a single pea had this petal long. And look!"

"Well?"

"Opserve, my friend, from this sweet pea, if you are thinking of getting marriet, that your child may resemble any forevater for three thousand years."

​"I am not thinking of getting married!" Hereford returned irritatedly.

Max turned with a bland smile. "Then what?"

"I came to ask you about emeralds, to get from you a list of the most precious emeralds in the world."

"The most brecious emerald in the world, my friend"—Max put the pot carefully down—"iss, beyont argument or doubt, the last little speck of green put by a man who loves ubon the finger of the lovet one."

"Then the next precious?"

"The next brecious would mean the largest, no doubt; and that—of course—iss the great Java emerald, the Surakarta. The next——"

"You need go no farther, Max."

"Ach!" Max said, with interest. "So it ​iss not about a list of emeralds you have come; but only about the great Surakarta?"

Hereford, looking carefully on both sides and under the bench where Max was sitting, sat down.

"That is true, Max. Where is it?"

"It iss in the tower of the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, my friend, where it has stayed six hundred years and will, perhaps, stay six hundred more in the steel box that was made that long ago to protect it. You will make no money out of the Surakarta, my friend. It iss not on the market to be sold; it iss not to be seen on exhibition even. Opserve a pretty story: Six hundred years ago there wass in that vertile island of Java a most cunning worker of metals. The Dutch had not yet come to the island, which was vertile then in brown men of intelligence as it iss ​vertile now in sugar and rice. This man could make statues of metal which, when one blew upon them, spoke words, as before that did the great stone statues of Egypt. He made faces out of steel which, when one pressed upon a lever, would change their exbression. So this man wass sent for by the Soesoehoenan that he might make a box which could be opened by no one who had not its secret; and in this box wass to be put the great Surakarta, which iss the sign of the sovereignty of Surakarta. While the Soesoehoenan holds that emerald no one can depose him; so it iss guarded as the heart of his power, and no one was to know the secret of the box but the Soesoehoenan and his favorite, so that in case the Soesoehoenan died the favorite still could open it. Then the man—this maker of metals—knowing what this ​meant, gafe a dinner to all his friends; and after the dinner he distributed to one and to another and gafe away all that he owned; and then he went and made the box; and after it wass finished, coming out, he was seized and strangled by order of the Soesoehoenan, as he had expected. Iss it not a bretty story?"

"And the emerald is all that they say of it, Max?"

"That, my friendt, I do not know; for I haf nefer seen it. But in Sumatra I met once a man who had seen it, and he said it iss not, but that there iss a small flaw in it. Whether that iss so or not iss something which I would like to know."

"I did not mean that, Max; I meant, the Javanese still—at least so I have been told—hold that strange superstition that the ​throne of Surakarta goes with the emerald?"

"To be sure. But in what iss that strange? What iss strange iss that the German William should be submitted to by all Germans as their ruler, when in broof he can show not efen an emerald!" Max lifted his chin in an argumentative manner. "An emerald iss at least an emerald; and when it iss the Surakarta it iss something more than an emerald. The man that hass that indeed hass something that is worth while."

The striped fish flopped with a loud splash in its glass trough, and Hereford frowned at the interruption to his thoughts. He felt now, with his irritation against his ward increased by his increased certainty, that it was imperative to see Lorine at once.

He got up and took leave of the little German. 

III

LORINE

Hereford hurried directly from Max to Lorine's hotel.

He was convinced now that behind all he had heard was an affair which, since it concerned the succession to a throne—if only a Malaysian throne—might indeed have involved his ward in some adventure more fantastically outrageous than all that had gone before.

Every few months, during the thirty in which he had been in charge of her affairs, Hereford had seen his ward's picture staring out at him from the newspapers, which gave generous space to her doings. Only a year ​before, upon the occasion of her starting the excavation of the Assyrian city, she had attained in the personal pages of one of the magazines the dignity of a careful fullpage halftone, with veil and sunshade, seated upon a camel. Before her father's sudden taking off, Hereford, then known only as banker to the firm but in reality closer in many ways than any other person to old Matthew Regan, had learned to look for the girl's face and figure, more especially in those Sunday papers which gave curious attention to the more extraordinary doings of Chicagoans abroad.

At that time, and even after her father's death he had found a sort of romantic interest in this undisciplined child who sped from corner to corner of the world merely at the dictates of her own caprice. But the events ​subsequent to his finding himself responsible for the actions of the girl had effaced this feeling, he thought, almost at once and fully.

As Lorine had been kept abroad by her father constantly from the time of Hereford's first association with him, he had never seen her. Once, after Matthew Regan's death, when business had called Hereford abroad, and again when affairs at home had made a holiday in Europe possible, he had offered to call upon her ostensibly to come to a more perfect understanding with her as to his own powers over her expenditures. Before then, however, through no fault of his own, his relations with her already had become strained and both times she had refused.

As an antagonist he had learned to respect her; for she was the only person in the world ​who had consistently thwarted and defeated him. But he recollected now, as he hurried toward her hotel, that, with all the surprising things she had done, she had never yet gone so far as to try to force her way into society; and he recalled all at once Matthew, her father,—militant and uncouth—with his head and neck of a triumphant bull and his vest spotted with dropped food. No doubt, he told himself, a Malaysian court, with its ten thousand half-clad attendants, might seem to her the easiest way to social distinction; and suddenly Hereford felt that now at last he knew her perfectly.

He was not in the least surprised, therefore, at the length of time she kept him waiting after he had sent up his card.

When finally he was ushered up he found a slender girl in a gray suit, with an ​abundance of dark hair, busily writing at a desk. She occupied in the rather large room the only chair, though marks upon the heavy hotel carpet here and there showed where other chairs just now had stood. He reddened with annoyance at this obvious attempt to put him at a disadvantage. He crossed, pushed open determinedly the door of an inner room, seized a chair and set it near the desk.

Then for the first time she looked up.

Her gray-blue eyes maliciously and audaciously flashed at him and the blood glowed pink under her clear white skin. "Why, she is beautiful!" he thought in amazement, for her published pictures had shown her no more than pretty. Startled at finding her so different from what he had expected, he ​remained standing with his hand on the back of the chair.

"After carrying that chair so far you might at least sit down," she offered. She seemed trying not to laugh.

He dropped into the chair.

He was trying unavailingly to reconcile her with his expectations of a flighty, undisciplined child. She was not a child, but a young and bewitching woman whose face showed the determination and tenacity, as the flash of her brilliant eyes showed the daring, of old Matthew Regan—but of Matthew Regan refined, cultured, self-disciplined by contact with many kinds of people; for he saw that to any one other than himself she would have appeared a person of graceful tact and, no matter where it might have been acquired, good breeding.

​"So you are Mr. Hereford," she stated, "and—you are not bald?"

"You expected me to be bald?" he asked dryly.

"Just as certainly as your letters to me have shown that you suspected me of being blondined. May I ask to what I owe the honor of this visit?"

"It could have no excuse except business," he retorted curtly.

"Have I overdrawn so much as all that?" A smile hovered upon her lips; her skirts took the delicate outline of her body as she turned slightly.

"Not in money. There is more at present to your credit than you asked for in your letter of this morning."

"Then you mean——"

"I have reason to suspect that you are ​attempting rather to overdraw in your personal activities."

"I prefer people to speak plainly—even people who are personally unpleasant to me." She continued to smile, however, radiating femininity.

"I shall do so," he said directly, "and in return I shall require from you an equally plain and definite answer as to the remarkable and unpleasant story that was brought to me this morning. Have you or have you not come here to receive a certain jewel, an emerald, which is known as the Surakarta?"

"I have." She had stopped smiling.

"I was told that your acceptance of this jewel has a definite and prearranged significance."

"It has." Her eyes flashed at him.

"That it meant betrothal."

​"A little more than that; for when I receive the emerald tomorrow my word is given a little more absolutely than in mere betrothal."

"To——"

"To the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, as undoubtedly you have been informed."

"A Malay—a Javanese?"

"Both, and likewise a most interesting and attractive gentleman who has done me the honor to pay me perfect respect—a respect which in some ways I have never received from those who had a greater right to call themselves gentlemen in Europe and—America."

"You mean that I have not respected you?" he said after a pause.

"You among others."

He surveyed her intently. "That is, ​however, a very different matter from allowing you to degrade your womanhood by a marriage such as this."

She stood up, looking him between the eyes. "But my womanhood, since you put it in that way, is something with which you have no concern." Then she went on quickly and caustically. "Let us have that plain between us. With my marriage you have absolutely nothing to do. You insisted upon a direct answer to your question and I have given it. Now, Mr. Hereford, if you feel inclined to return to your office it will leave me at liberty to finish the letter I was writing."

He stared as she turned away from him, for he was not used to such treatment from women. He had noted while she was speaking the willful and triumphant lifting of her ​chin, but now that she had averted her face every line of her body seemed wholly—and softly, deliciously—feminine. He was obliged to control himself in a way to which he was not used.

"Miss Regan," he said more coldly than he felt was diplomatic but in the only way he could, "you have always made it very plain to me that you would accept no interference from me outside of financial matters. On my part I have attempted more than once to limit or modify certain of your extraordinary activities by the assertion of authority I did not possess. I thought I owed it to your father. I do not know exactly how much you know of my start with your father. I do not know what gave him so great confidence in me when I first met him. I know only that he had it and expressed it. His ​putting his affairs into my hands gave me my real start six years ago—attracted to me other business which has since made me."

"And it would undoubtedly do very much to unmake you if now by my marriage my affairs were taken out of your hands," she asserted.

"Fortunately I am already so placed that the removal of the administration of your estate would scarcely cripple me. However, as I said, your father's friendship for me in the past made me. On account of him I made those attempts to check you after he was dead—to check you from things he himself, if he were alive, might have encouraged you in, but the certain results of which I could see. However, as you have more than once astutely observed, I made those attempts ​without power to control you. The present matter is different."

"Will you tell me how it is different?" She had turned back to him uneasily.

"There is definitely provided, Miss Regan, in a clause of some three or four lines in the papers that gave me charge of your father's estate, the power for me to prevent you from any irreparable act. None of your many adventures of foolishness and vanity from which I have previously tried to check you have been such that, in court, I could expect to hold them as coming under the provisions of that clause. So far, then, my hands were tied; but this adventure you threaten would be quite irreparable. There is no court in the country that would not sustain my right to hold you from it under my powers."

​"You think you—or the courts— could prevent my doing something to which I have made up my mind? The courts could not prevent my father." Her uneasiness, however, seemed increased.

He rose, picking up his hat, now that he was about to crush her.

"I am obliged, as you have found out, to furnish you funds in addition to your regular allowance up to the total of your income for the year, for you to spend in any manner you choose," he went on dryly, "except in case you undertake something in which you risk irreparable injury. I am left to decide for myself what would be irreparable; if you appeal it must be left to two other friends whom your father appointed. There is no question that they will agree with me in recognizing that this intended marriage of ​yours is no real marriage at all, but only a more reckless and defiant adventure in which you will be done irreparable injury. I have, therefore, the power and I shall exercise it."

"To do what?" she questioned swiftly.

"To cut you off immediately, without a cent of your ordinary or extraordinary income," he said roughly as he turned away—"or any other funds until you give up this marriage!"

She laughed long and merrily, throwing back her head, and he turned back to her in amazement.

"Your powers are tremendous, Mr. Hereford."

"They will suffice to keep you from funds not only now, but, if you are mad enough to go farther with this, I will keep your money from you indefinitely."

​She stood up suddenly.

"You seem to think you have disguised your real nature so that I could not foresee you would do this—and therefore keep by me rather more than enough for all personal expenses before my marriage," she said.

"I amuse you?" he demanded angrily.

"It is rather amusing to find you counting upon a million or so, as an added inducement to the Soesoehoenan to marry me, when he is ready to pay for me the Surakarta. So that is all you can do, Mr. Hereford?"

"That is all I can do legally," he blurted out.

"Ah, legally!" she teased. "I really had done you the honor to forget for a moment that, besides being a banker, you were a lawyer."

Suddenly he lost his self-control. He was ​allured and repulsed at the same time by this girl who for thirty months had irritated, vexed, thwarted, baffled him. She was charming and exasperating. The Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, who had been to him until this moment merely a name, became suddenly a personality, a threat.

"You shall not debase yourself like this!" he cried. "This emerald shall not reach you tomorrow!"

"You are without doubt a very clever man, Mr. Hereford; but you are not so clever that I shall not receive the emerald."

"Legally, illegally, however it is done, you shall not receive it!"

"No?" she mocked.

"No!" he shouted furiously. ​

"You are not so clever that I shall not receive the emerald"

IV

A MYSTERY FOR THE POLICE

When at sixty it had occurred to Max Schimmel that, in spite of an excellent constitution, unimpaired even in eyesight, he was not likely to live more than sixty years longer, and consequently he ought to leave the wilderness and see something of people, he had brought with him many of his former companions.

Complaint now had been lodged against him so many times that, his persuasiveness with the police having lost its efficacy, his household had been greatly reduced. Still, an ocelot, a couple of muskrats, an ibis and a heron—not to mention the other lizards in ​the glass case with the Gila specimen—the least vociferous members of Max' household, remained to occupy his morning attention; and it was seldom, as Max became better known, that there was not also some ailing dog or cat, or a parrot under the weather, confided to his temporary care by its owner.

A Chinese boy picked up at Canton, and therefore illegally smuggled into Chicago, served him as animal-keeper as well as cook and houseboy. Even with this aid Max, who in the jungle had been accustomed to breakfast at four o'clock, in the city often did not breakfast until ten. Gradually, with only occasional lapses, he had taught himself to read the newspapers each morning instead of saving them up for weeks and getting all the news at once, as it always had come to him before; and he had even attained such ​commonplaceness of civilization as to read at breakfast.

Slowly and dispassionately, yet with interest and absorption increasing with every line, he read the leading columns on the morning after Hereford had consulted him about the emerald:

"Robbery under the most inexplicable circumstances; romance of a most extraordinary sort; these—and possible international complications—combined yesterday in the most dramatic mystery that has puzzled the Chicago police for years. The great emerald known as the Surakarta—a historic stone supposed by jewel experts to be safe in the castle of the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, Java, where it had been kept for six hundred years—was abstracted from a locked steel box at the Hotel Tonty in a manner so ​bewilderingly inexplicable that the police, until convinced to the contrary, maintained that the robbery could not have taken place.

"Linked with the robbery is a remarkable romance involving the eccentric daughter of a formerly prominent Chicago family. A young Chicago lawyer of national reputation also appears to be implicated.

"From an extraordinary confusion of reports, charges, counter-charges and denials, asseverations, rumors and explanations, these facts stand out:

"The affair certainly started with a visit of Miss Lorine Regan to the Soesoehoenan—one of the two undeposed native sultans of Java—some six or eight months ago.

"Those who have been following the foreign cables, especially during the last two years since Miss Regan came into possession ​of her father's—the packer's—estate, do not find it hard to believe that, as is stated, she made a bargain with the Soesoehoenan to marry him if he would give her the great state emerald of Java, the Surakarta—the priceless possession of the island and the greatest emerald in the world.

"Whatever the facts may be, it is certain that a party of Javanese gentlemen attached to the Soesoehoenan's court arrived in Chicago yesterday to meet Miss Regan here, bearing with them a famous steel antique combination box—said to be the oldest steel combination fastening in the world—containing the great emerald. The fact that the stone was actually here and safe in its box last night is vouched for not only by the Javanese envoy, in whose charge it was, but also by customs officials at San Francisco ​and Chicago and agents of the government secret service. The emerald while in this country has been watched with great interest by the United States government because of its political importance.

"The greatest secrecy was, however, maintained, not only on account of the nature of the errand, but because of the increased risk if the presence of the great emerald were generally known.

"However, it appears that Mr. Wade Hereford—the trustee of the Regan estate—was yesterday informed of its presence; and, after a call upon Miss Regan in which he did everything in his power to prevent or delay her acceptance of the stone, he called upon the Javanese envoys upon the same errand. That was in the afternoon.

"Later in the evening, returning, he ​demanded, as trustee of the Regan estate and therefore practically Miss Regan's guardian, to be shown the great emerald, to be sure of the reality of it before the form of its reception by his ward should be gone through with the next day.

"The stone was then, as usual, in the box; but the envoy, who alone was intrusted with the combination, which is operated by a series of buttons and levers that must be manipulated in a certain complicated order, opened the box and satisfied Mr. Hereford of the reality of the emerald.

"The box was then closed and secured as usual, and the envoy, in whose room it was, went to bed. The door of the room was locked and also bolted on the inside. Both windows were securely fastened. There are no other openings into the room.

​"The box stood in the middle of the room, near the foot of the bed of the Javanese envoy. It has been the custom of the envoy ever since leaving Java to sleep in the same room with the emerald. The steel box was wrapped in heavy paper as, according to the Javanese, it had been since leaving San Francisco, where the Javanese had been embarrassed by crowds which followed them upon the streets, attracted by the strange design of the box.

"This was the situation at eleven o'clock.

"About twelve the envoy was awakened by sounds of tearing paper and realized that some one was tearing the paper from the box. The noise was so loud and the tearing went on so heedlessly of the fact that he had moved that—in the darkness—he assumed that more than one man, enough to ​power him if he attacked, must be at the box.

"He is certain that at that time—and subsequently—neither of the doors was open and that both windows were still closed as he had left them.

"The Javanese fired two quick shots from the revolver he had under his pillow. He did this as an alarm, but he was also confident that in the rather small room he could not fail to hit one or another of the thieves. He crouched upon the bed, expecting a return fire; but to his surprise no attention whatever was paid; the tearing of the paper continued without the least apparent interruption.

"The envoy then fired three times. His attendants had been roused and were attempting to force the door, and this reassured him that the door was still locked. ​He heard no longer the sound of tearing paper, but it had been succeeded by the rapid clicking of the buttons and levers of the box. He recognized from the sound that they were being rapidly manipulated in the order which was correct for opening the box. The room was pitch-dark and now choked with powder smoke.

"Having now only one shot left in his revolver, the envoy fired for the last time with greater care. He was confident that this shot took effect, but at the same instant he discharged it he heard the sound of the opening of the box. Doubtful in the darkness of being able to find the electric light, he dashed forward with open arms to seize the thief. His outstretched arms, however, encountered no one; he stumbled over the box and fell full length upon the floor. He ​got up and ran here and there in the dark, finding no one, but coming suddenly in contact with the electric light, he switched it on.

"To his unspeakable astonishment he found himself alone in the room. Except for the confusion he himself had caused, there was not the least sign of any other presence—except about the box. The paper wrappings of the box had been torn and stripped away, however; the box itself stood open and the great emerald was gone! Both doors were still locked and bolted from the inside; the windows were still closed and fastened down. Moreover, below the windows was a straight drop of ten floors.

"At this instant the envoy's attendants succeeded in forcing the door. Two of them remained to guard the opening, while the others entered the room. Their examination ​developed the most surprising feature of this whole remarkable case. The last shot of the envoy had indeed taken effect, as was witnessed by a spot, incontestably of blood, upon the floor in front of the open, empty box. From this larger spot drops of blood led in the direction the thief had gone; but he had not gone toward either of the doors—he had not gone toward the windows. He had gone toward the third side of the room, which offers only a blank solid wall. At the foot of this wall the drops of blood stopped. There were no others to be found anywhere in the room!"

When the account in the newspaper reached this point Max stopped and struck his hands together as a summons. It was answered by the Chinese boy.

"Chang!"

​"Yles."

"Go out and burchase gopies for me of all this morning's bapers," said Max.

He then finished the few succeeding words of the surprising account:

"Here, therefore, is the apparently insoluble problem which confronts the police: What became of the man who took the emerald? He did not go out through the wall, for a man cannot step through a wall of solid brick; but, aside from the testimony furnished by the drops of blood, there is complete evidence that he did not go out anywhere else. The attendants of the Javanese envoy had arrived in a body outside the only exit door while the robbery was still in progress; and they found this door not only locked but bolted inside, so that they were ​forced to break it down in order to effect an entrance into the room.

"The other door leads only into the bathroom, from which escape is impossible; and this door was locked and the keys of both doors were under the pillow of the envoy. Aviation has not reached such development that burglars enter and leave through tenth-story windows; and also both windows were securely locked upon the inside, and were found still so fastened after the robbery.

"The very pretty serving maid who answered the door at Miss Regan's hotel apartments declares that her mistress has nothing to say. Mr. Wade Hereford's valet made the same statement for his master. Telephone calls for these two were unanswered. The Javanese envoy, whose American dress and English speech fail to hide his frantic ​terror and anxiety, has plainly told all that he knows; and his account, which tallies in every particular with the narratives of the members of his suite, has put the police completely at a loss. No member of the Javanese party shows any wound which could account in a manner different from that described by the envoy for the presence of the drops of blood."

Max, when he compared this account with those of the other morning papers which the boy had brought, found that it differed from them in no essential particular, though he re-read them all slowly, with interest increasing at every line.

Finally he put the papers thoughtfully away and went out into his garden to meditate.

His pigeons, from their cote upon the roof, ​fluttered and strutted about him. It was past the time to feed them, but Max had forgot. They fell into great disturbance at sight of him; one lighted on his shoulder and he remembered. He brought some shelled corn and began to scatter it upon the ground.

"He wass there, but he wass not there; he tore the baper off," said Max to himself or to the pigeons. "He woke the Javanese tearing the baper to strips. The box—it wass covered with baper, which wass not usual. He tore it off loudly and he opened the box. So he wass there—because he tore off the baper and opened the box. But he wass not there, because nobody wass there. He could not go out through doors or windows that were locked, and to walk out through the wall—that is imbossible!"

He began to drop the corn in little piles, ​a handful at a time, not noticing what he was doing.

"He wass there, because he tore the baper off loudly. Berhaps he did not exbect the box to be covered with baper; and therefore he tore it off so loudly that it wass heard. It follows, therefore, that he wass there. To say he wass not there, that also is imbossible!"

He dumped the remaining corn in a heap and stood still.

"To be there wass not enough," he said gravely. "Also he must know—and in the dark—that the box wass beneath the baper. I would like to know—yes, I would wonder if that box hass a smell!"

Suddenly he threw away the measure that had held the corn.

"Chang!"

​"Yles."

"If that box hass a smell——"

"Yles."

"If that box hass a smell, Chang, then I would say: Here is a jewel stolen in a way that iss not usual. Gif me my hat."

"Yles."

"I am going out. I do not know when I will be back. See to all things. I have chust fed the bigeons."

He took his hat and went out quickly into the street.

V

MR. HEREFORD HAS A GUNSHOT WOUND

Wade Hereford knew that his office force on the morning after the loss of the Surakarta showed a nervous agitation unsuited to a Chicago banking office, still less usual in any surroundings of his own. This annoyed because it hampered him in his very unusual activities of the day, which included communications by telephone, telegram—and even foreign cable. He was teased, too, by the pain in his left hand, which was swathed in bandages the expert wrapping of which showed that the accident—whatever it had been—was at least serious enough to have required the services of ​a physician. But these causes, even when taken together, did not fully account for the irritation with which he received Max Schimmel's card, when it was brought to the inner office where he was closeted with a visitor.

"It is a naturalist friend of mine whom I consulted yesterday, perhaps a little precipitately, as to the real existence of the Surakarta," he explained to his companion.

Great as had been Hereford's eagerness to consult Max the afternoon before, this morning he had no wish at all to see him; but he could find, as he drummed impatiently with the card upon the desk, no excuse under the circumstances by which he could put the German off. So he went out to him.

Max Schimmel's dispassionate gaze shifted mildly from Hereford's face to his bandaged hand and back again.

​"What hass been happening here, my friendt?" he inquired curiously.

"Have you never heard, Max," Hereford dryly demanded, "of any one charging another with doing a thing which he, the accuser, admits could not have been done in the way he accuses?"

"Many times," Max returned blandly. "Wherefore——"

"Wherefore what?"

"If you haf done it do not fail to maintain that it must haf been done in the way they accuse; but if you haf not done it, then show them it must haf been done otherwise."

"You, too, Max?" Hereford said still more dryly.

"Too—what, my friendt?"

"Implicate me?"

"In what, my friendt?"

​"You, of course, have heard that the Surakarta has been stolen, but perhaps not yet that they say I was at the bottom of its disappearance?"

"Then there iss no exblanation of how it wass taken—there iss nothings more than wass given in the morning bapers?"

"Nothing."

Max Schimmel rubbed his hands with satisfaction.

"I must help you to show them, then, my friendt, that the jewel wass taken in a way which it could not be taken by you."

Hereford glanced with annoyance about the office. Max, he saw, was about to demand fuller explanation and he felt, under the circumstances, he could not refuse it.

"Come in, then," he ungraciously decided. "I have already carried out so much of your ​advice—before you gave it—as to engage the services of a detective—McAdams, from one of the best private agencies in the city. I was preparing to make a statement to him when you came in, and I see no reason why I should not give it to you both at once."

He led the way into the inner office.

"This is Max Schimmel," he introduced.

McAdams scrutinized Max, started to speak and checked himself. The little German, on his part, turned with increased curiosity from the flushed face of his friend to the stolid countenance of the heavily built, unintelligent-looking detective. McAdams did not bear externally any evidence of the ability Hereford apparently had found in him.

"Well?" Max demanded when he had ​weighed this fact. "Now we will have the statement?"

"My first information even of the existence of the Surakarta," Hereford began promptly, "was yesterday when a traveler, who had chanced to come over on the same boat as the Javanese, came to me as the trustee of the Regan estate to tell me why the jewel was brought here. I was, of course, displeased and angry, especially as his story was borne out by a message from Miss Regan, almost at the same time, that she was in town. To assure myself the story was not a mere fabrication I went first to Max, from whom I learned that the jewel really existed."

The German gravely nodded corroboration.

"Then I went to Miss Regan to discover ​whether she was indeed a party to such a bargain and to prevent her carrying out her part of it; but I accomplished nothing, except to learn that she had really promised herself to the Soesoehoenan upon receipt of the emerald. Finally, late in the afternoon, I called upon the envoy of the Soesoehoenan—whose name is Baraka—at the Hotel Tonty, and attempted through him to prevent the affair from going farther. He was at first polite, then obdurate, finally angry—and we had a heated discussion.

"Nevertheless, in the evening I went to see him again. It had occurred to me how easily the Soesoehoenan might have substituted an imitation stone for the real one, and I was at least resolved that Miss Regan should not undergo the further disgrace of being tricked.

​"I will be perfectly frank with you," he said after an instant. "I did not believe a false jewel would be substituted. I wanted to see this stone—but only partly because it could make a girl like Miss Regan promise to marry a Malay. I had another long argument with Baraka, at the end of which he acknowledged the justice of my claim and opened the box and showed me the emerald."

"It was the real one?" McAdams inquired.

"I am no judge of jewels," Hereford replied; "but the stone itself was proof of its own identity. It is a wonderful, an amazing gem. I could understand better, after I had seen it, the effect it had had upon my ward. Yes, it was the real one."

"You left the envoy after he had showed you the stone?" McAdams asked.

​"Then I left him," Hereford assented.

He folded and unfolded with his good hand the corner of a chance scrap of paper that lay on the desk, almost nervously.

"The next incident that concerns the emerald was the visit Baraka paid me this morning at my office," he recommenced. "He had been first to my rooms, but I left home very early this morning. The stone had disappeared and he came to me on the evident suspicion of my complicity in its disappearance."

"Because you had seen him open the box?"

"Yes; it was, he claimed, the first time the box ever had been opened except in the presence of the royal pair."

"But Baraka himself, you have said, knew the secret of the box?"

​"He says he is the first person—and the only one—to whom the secret has been confided; and it was taught to him only just before he set out for this country. He was chosen by the Soesoehoenan as his envoy, I understand, because his estate in Java is so large that the value even of the Surakarta itself is not sufficient to pay him to make away with it; and his father, mother, wives and children, as well as his estate, are hostages with the Soesoehoenan for the safe delivery of the stone."

"I see."

"Baraka came here alone, except for one attendant. He was quite beside himself with anxiety, terror and bewilderment; for, besides the amazing manner in which the emerald disappeared, Baraka, though he speaks excellent English, has never before visited ​America and is not familiar with American methods and customs. He had, moreover, been subjected during the whole night to the questioning of the police and secret-service officers, before they assured themselves that he himself had had nothing to do with the disappearance of the gem."

"Then they did assure themselves of that?"

"Completely; they are satisfied that neither Baraka nor any member of his suite was concerned in it."

"Then we need not consider that possibility."

"Baraka's visit here was occasioned, as I have said, by his suspicions of me, due to my having seen him open the box. When he saw that between ten o'clock last night, when he showed me the emerald, and nine ​o'clock this morning, when he made his call on me at this office, I had been wounded in my left hand, his suspicions appeared to become certainties."

"He was not satisfied, then, with the explanation you gave him of the nature of your wound?" McAdams had looked up in surprise.

"The wound is a gunshot wound."

"I mean, he would not accept the proof you must have offered him that you had been wounded in some other way than by his bullet?"

"I offered no such proof."

McAdams and Max both stared at Hereford in amazement. The young trustee, on his part, for the first time found difficulty in formulating what he had to say.

"I offered no proof," he repeated even ​more directly. "I was obliged to leave him, as well as the police, to imagine as they pleased what circumstances, what motives, could force a man of reputation and character like mine to remain silent as to how he received a wound that subjects him to the suspicions and the dangers I now run."

"It seems strange, Mr. Hereford," the detective offered after a pause, "but no doubt I'll find your reasons for acting in that way quite sufficient."

"I offer no reasons, even to you. You must be content, for the time at least, to regard this wound merely as a coincidence," Hereford replied curtly.

The detective gnawed his mustache, staring fixedly and doubtfully at his client.

"You spoke of the police," he said at last.

"Because Baraka returned here, an hour ​after his first visit, with two police officers."

"And formally charged you with the theft?"

"Yes; but was dissuaded by the police from taking out a warrant. The inexplicable nature of the robbery, which has perplexed and confused the police as much as it has bewildered the Javanese themselves, as well as my connections and reputation that assure the police that I will not run away, made them want to await further developments. They seemed, too, to feel that the motive assigned to me by Baraka was inadequate."

"Then that motive——"

"Baraka does not accuse me of making away with the stone for its intrinsic value, but in order that the negotiations for Miss Regan's marriage might be stopped. He ​had learned that the control of her property would pass from my hands if she married."

"Which would inconvenience you?"

"It would reduce my income," Hereford admitted after some hesitation.

McAdams rose resignedly.

"As you have employed me, sir, to establish your innocence rather than to develop a case against you, I think I can do better by going to the scene of the robbery than by questioning you any further now." And he turned his eyes doubtfully upon Max.

"Goot!" Max exclaimed with alacrity. "I shall be glad to accompany. Ah, my friendt"—he raised his hand as Hereford frowned—"permit it! Yesterday you come to me and ask from me—well, my friendt, things that today haf significance. Today—I must see more, my friendt!"

​Hereford watched the calm little man uncertainly for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

VI

THE ROOM AT THE TONTY

The Hotel Tonty is one of those of the newer sort, where luxury takes the place of refinement. Hereford, immediately upon arriving with his two companions, presented his card to the uniformed police officer stationed in the corridor. A moment later the three were ushered into the parlor of the Javanese suite.

The half dozen brown-skinned men, dressed in European clothes, lounging nervously about, started up with angry exclamations at the sight of Hereford. Another appeared who, without comment, led the ​three visitors through several rooms into the presence of Baraka.

"This is Mr. McAdams," Hereford announced, "whom I have retained to look after my interests in the matter of the emerald. Herr Schimmel has also been consulted."

The envoy of the Soesoehoenan—a tall and fine-looking man, wearing in the privacy of his room his native embroidered loose jacket, though English trousers took the place of his sarong—showed plainly the effect of twelve hours of perplexity, anxiety and terror. He took a step toward Hereford, his eyes flashing with rage.

"You want——" he demanded, controlling himself.

"To see the room," McAdams put in, "and ​to get your own statement of what happened here last night."

"Ah! To see the room!" Baraka mocked. "And to ask for a statement! Of what use is a statement, since this one can tell you better than I what happened here?" He pointed to Hereford.

He walked nervously about, pressing his hands together.

"Obtain the key!" he suddenly directed one of the Javanese who had followed the three as though keeping guard over them; and when it was brought Baraka himself crossed the room to a locked door and flung it open.

"Enter!" he commanded.

The room was dark as Hereford and his two companions entered. They could distinguish vaguely in it objects disarranged in ​the utmost confusion. Baraka directed a Javanese to raise the shades.

The room appeared then as a more than commonly luxurious hotel room, eighteen feet by twenty, and furnished, except for the brass bed, in mahogany. It presented the unusual feature of having two blank walls. Being the end room of the suite, it had no connection at all with the hallway of the hotel. On the west side the wall was hung with several pictures; and on the north wall, which also was unbroken, there were pictures and a tapestry. The doorways, three in number, were all in the south wall. To the left of the entrance door, through which they looked, was another which plainly belonged to the clothes-closet; and to the right beyond the bed, which stood with its ​head against this south wall, was the door to the bathroom.

The fourth or east side of the room faced over the street and there were two wide windows in it. McAdams, approaching these windows, saw there was a clear drop below them of one hundred and twenty feet, and that there was neither cornice nor fire escape anywhere in sight below or about them to give access from another window on the same floor, or from the floor above or below.

The disorder of the room was plainly that in which it had been left by the Javanese at the conclusion of their search. The bedding was pulled from the bed; the writing desk, which had stood by the north wall, had been pulled out into the room; and the stand near the west wall, which held a suitcase, had likewise been moved from its place, as was ​witnessed by a second suitcase overturned on the floor in front of it; the floor was littered with strips of torn paper, and everything in the room seemed to have been swept violently from its position, except indeed the box that had held the Surakarta. The box still occupied what was obviously its original position on the floor, halfway between the north wall and the bed.

"You have not occupied this room, then, since last night?" McAdams asked Baraka.

"By request of the police everything has been left as it was," the envoy answered. "Yes, everything; I have changed nothing."

McAdams nodded his satisfaction and commenced with assurance his closer scrutiny.

He opened and inspected the doors of the clothes-closet and bathroom; he examined ​the bed and studied what must have been the original position of the chairs and various articles of furniture. He sounded the wall and floor, and mounting upon a chair, the ceiling. Having satisfied himself of the impossibility of exit except through the single door, he turned back to Baraka.

"Now tell me what you think happened here," he directed. "How do you suppose the fellow ever got in?"

"How did he get in?" the Javanese rejoined. "I do not know—he knows!" He again accused the imperturbable Hereford. "All doors are locked, also bolted within. The light is out. I am asleep. A sound awakes me—the tearing of paper—that about the box! Ah! He is so bold! I think there must be more than one. If I alarm them they will take away the box. Two can ​carry it but not one. There is no light at all—perfectly dark; but my revolver is under my pillow. I find it without noise and fire twice, quick! I see nothing—only the flash of the revolver. And there is no change—only the bold tearing of the paper. Again I fire—three times! Still nothing but the flash of my pistol—a red streak in the dark—nothing more; the great pound in the ears.

"But no longer the sound of paper; instead, the clicking of the levers of the box! He is opening the box—he knows how to open it. You are a brave man, Mr. Hereford—five times I have shot, not knowing then who he was; yet in the dark, swiftly, without seeing at all, he makes to click the levers which, clicking so, throw the box open. And I have but one shot in my revolver.

"I crawl upon the bed. I remember that ​in the afternoon, lying upon the bed, I could see through the foot—which is of brass—the box. Now, feeling with my fingers in the dark, I find the place through which I saw the box. I put the pistol through it. The last time I fire! And now I know I hit him! But no noise; no cry—only the rising of the cover of the box!

"I toss all care of myself away! I fling myself upon him; I grope; but I feel nothing—nothing but that the box is already open and empty! The emerald—the great Surakarta—it is gone! I rush back to the door so he may not get out. It is still locked and bolted. He has not escaped. Entirely reckless, I turn on the light; but—he is not there! He has disappeared! The door behind me is bolted and locked. Those other doors before the clothes-closet and before the ​bathroom, too, are fastened. The windows—neither of them has been raised. He is not under the bed. The drawers in the bureau—they can contain no one; but I look. All the time my suite they are outside the door, crying to be let in and breaking at the door; but no, I cry to them to watch there while I alone—I not caring what happens to me—look. But there is nowhere else to look. There is nothing at all in the room. Yet the box has been opened! The emerald is gone!

"I am beside myself! My suite have broken in. They search everywhere; but there is nowhere I have not myself looked. There is no sign of him—nothing; he is not here. But he has left his blood—this one—the only one who besides myself in this country can know how to open the box; for ​I in my folly, two hours before, clicked the levers in their order for him to see; and it is from his hand the blood has flowed. See now upon his hand the mark of my last shot!"

"I find five shots," McAdams confirmed calmly, "and their appearance indicates that, as you have said, they were fired from the bed; but, unless your last night's visitor carried off the other, there should be six."

"Just in this way I point my pistol when I fire at him the last time!" Baraka willingly advanced to the bed, felt for and found an aperture in the scrollwork of its foot and put his finger through it. "Notice how I point—if it would not wound the hand of him opening the box!"

Hereford himself nodded to McAdams to admit it without objection; and, following the direction pointed by Baraka's finger, he ​pointed out the sixth bullet, which, slightly deflected from its course and imbedded in the plaster of the wall, they had missed before. This bullet was close to the floor in the north wall; the remaining five were about the height of a man's chest.

"And these drops of blood"—the detective's eyes followed along the floor the trail of blood from the box in the middle of the room leading direct to the middle of the blank wall—"are the marks of that last shot?"

"The first drops from his hand—yes!"

The detective bent to the floor. The drops of blood, greatest in number close to the box, made, however, a plainly discernible track to the foot of the north wall, where it was hung with tapestry. McAdams, putting out his hand to lift this tapestry, drew back.

​"It looks," he said, "as if some one had lifted this before me—and with a bloody hand."

A spot of blood was plain upon the tapestry where he pointed. He then lifted the tapestry and struck the wall several heavy blows. The wall gave out a solid sound.

"What is on the other side of this wall?" he asked.

"On the other side is the stair of the hotel," Baraka replied.

"Then it is a solid brick wall and extends without opening of any sort from the foundations of the hotel to the roof. That is the city ordinance. No one went through there. He must have come and gone through the door."

"Are we fools?" the envoy burst out. "The door was locked and bolted within all ​the time. He"—he again pointed to Hereford—"was in the room after suite already were at the only door to go out; but when the light was turned on he was not here. No one was in the clothes-closet; no one in the bathroom; no one in or under the bed. We took up even the carpet to look. The drops of blood, too, do not lead to any door—only to the wall."

"But how could he go through the wall—or do you doubt the wall?" McAdams demanded.

"No, I do not doubt the wall," the Javanese replied. "I have tried it. I know it is there. But"—he fixed upon Hereford a suddenly superstitious look in which terror and anger seemed equally mingled—"there has been brought to my country from other lands the X-ray, by which men see the bones ​while they are still within the body; and the wireless, by which men can talk to men across a thousand miles of sea. How do I know what else have here?"

McAdams grunted and turned abruptly to his more careful examination of the box.

He inspected closely the ordinary brown wrapping paper scattered in torn strips round the box and a piece of stout string that lay among them.

"The paper was wrapped round the box, I understand?" he questioned.

"Since San Francisco," Baraka assented. "In Java we had guards to keep away the people and on the steamer the box is in my stateroom; but in San Francisco crowds gather—so strange a sight to them, Javanese carrying such a box. We can hardly pass through the people. That night I wrap ​the box in paper; and so it has been since; three—four days, therefore."

"And it was tied with this string?"

"Yes; but—no! When I so foolishly show the emerald to Mr. Hereford I have untied the string. Afterward I do not again tie it, but only wrap the paper round."

McAdams pulled away carefully the wrappings of paper that still clung to the lower part of the box. It then could be seen that the box which had contained the great emerald was a huge and heavy thing, made entirely of iron or steel. Something over two feet high and about the same in breadth and a little more in length, its design was a stout, thick steel, square column, with the steel figure of a man squatted upon each face. Each figure was, indeed, little more than a high relief from the side of the column, and ​the trunk of each figure was cast as part of the column, making an unbreakable, solid piece. The head and hands of each figure, however, moved; and, as Baraka explained, these were the levers which—pulled or pushed—turned one way or the other in a certain order—released a bolt within the column, so that the top plate lifted and the box opened.

Upon the four figures there were, therefore, eight hands and four heads; each head could be moved in four directions and also could be pressed in or pulled out slightly. There were, accordingly, twenty-four different operations possible with the head levers alone. Each hand was also capable of six similar different manipulations, or forty-eight for the hands—a total of seventy-two different manipulations. Of these, eighteen, ​done correctly and in order, opened the box. If any wrong lever were tried before the eighteen were twisted, pushed or pulled, each correctly, the combination would not work and it was impossible to open the box.

Max Schimmel now, after listening attentively to this explanation by Baraka, bent over the closed box.

"What iss within?" he inquired.

"Nothing is within," Baraka replied. "The emerald only was within; and since that is gone there is nothing."

Max shook his head. The air of this, as of all the rooms occupied by the Javanese, was heavy with Oriental odors; but among them Max seemed to have detected something as he stooped and sniffed close to the box.

"Sandalwood iss within," Max declared.

​"The interior of the box is sandalwood—yes," Baraka answered curiously.

"Ah! Sandalwood! Quite distinctly I smell it now," said Max with satisfaction. "Before, I thought so—but I could not be certain; for outside it iss all iron—only inside it iss sandalwood."

"What of that?" McAdams demanded; and when Max, sniffing more leisurely, only smiled in reply the detective attempted to lift the cover of the box, which did not yield.

"It is locked?" he questioned Baraka.

"It is always locked; to push down the cover is to lock it."

"Open it then."

Baraka demurred. "Once I open the box with him by, and misfortune came." But he finally consented on condition that they turn their backs.

​Hiding his movements with his body, even behind their backs, he clicked the levers until they had counted seventeen such clicks. Turning then as he pressed the last lever, they saw the cover of the box rise slowly to a vertical position; and now, plainly and distinctly to all, the heavy odor of the sandalwood interior of the box filled the room.

"And you think," McAdams exclaimed, "from seeing you twist and turn those eighteen once, Mr. Hereford could have made the combination out and memorized it! You think he could come here in the dark—through locked doors—and open the box swiftly, as you yourself have said, without hesitation or error!" The detective made a gesture of derision. "The choice in selecting the first manipulation is one movement out of seventy-two; the choice of the second ​multiplies that. The chance of making correctly eighteen straight in succession can be only one in millions. No one—not even Mr. Hereford—could have mastered that from seeing the box once opened. Mr. Baraka, your story is preposterous! No one could have got in here:—no one could have got out afterward! Least of all could any one have opened the box!"

And he turned for confirmation to Max.

Max Schimmel, however, since he had received confirmation that the box had an odor had apparently taken no note of anything else that was passing. He stood now with a pleased face, his gaze swiftly sweeping for a second time and still more comprehensively the details of the room—the exit doors, the disordered bed, the writing desk, the stand with the suitcases. The question had to be ​repeated before he took heed of it. Then he began to rub his hands softly together.

"Prut! But no! It could haf been done!" he exclaimed delightedly. "All as he says, it could haf been done! I am glad I came to see this, even from the inderior of Asia! For now it iss marvelous, mysterious; but when it iss exblained then it will appear gommonblace that the box wass obened and the emerald taken from the box, even from under our friendt's revolver point!"

Baraka's eyes flashed balefully at Hereford.

"Even your own friend—you see!—even your own friend," he hissed, "says as I say!"

Wade Hereford returned the envoy's stare steadily, then he glanced toward Max and the detective and slightly smiled.

​"If you both have quite completed your investigation," he said in a rather bored tone, "let us go."

He nodded to Baraka, who continued threateningly to stare him full in the face, and, while the other angry Javanese unwillingly made way for him, preceded the party through the rooms of the envoy's suite back to the elevator.

VII

THE MAN WHO SHOT AT NOTHING

Max Schimmel had intended to ask Baraka if it was true that there was a flaw in the Surakarta; but he had forgotten this in the interest he had taken in the examination of the room. He recollected, as the elevator was dropping them to the first floor, but he at once forgot it a second time in his rapt contemplation of the dining rooms of the Hotel Tonty which were visible in all directions from the lobby.

These dining rooms reminded Max of the boastful tribal feasts he had seen among the most savage peoples. At this hour nearly every table was filled. Max observed that ​the most gorgeously dressed luncheon parties had chosen, or had been placed, at the most prominent tables, as he had seen in the Polynesian islands the best places appropriated by those who wore the greatest number of beads and pieces of punched tin. It appeared to him, too, that, exactly as he had sometimes seen a savage gain fame and at the same time ruin himself in setting out a single meal, so these persons gained social distinction directly in the ratio of the amount they spent upon food. Immersed in the contemplation of these social facts—which he regarded with the same dispassionate interest he formerly had shown in observing the customs of the head-hunters of Borneo—Max seemed wholly oblivious that just now by his statement to Baraka he probably had done great injury to his friend Hereford.

​"I shall lunch here. Do you two care to join me?" Hereford invited.

He led the way to one of the smaller tables, as yet unoccupied because it stood in a secluded corner, and as soon as they were seated McAdams turned to Max.

"It would have been better, Schimmel," the detective exclaimed belligerently, "if we had not taken you to that room—if you are a friend of Mr. Hereford's."

Max started to speak, glanced suddenly at Hereford and halted.

"We're waiting for your explanation," McAdams announced.

"But at bresent—no; I cannot gif you any exblanation," Max replied guardedly.

"Because none is possible," said McAdams, decidedly.

From the direction of his gaze he seemed ​to be meditating upon the unexplained circumstance of Hereford's wound and upon the complicated mechanism of the box whose intricate manipulation he had just declared offered proof that Hereford could not have done it. Hereford, who had been studying the bill of fare while he gave their orders, now laid it down and looked at McAdams, slightly smiling. Suddenly the detective brought his hand heavily down upon the table.

"No explanation is possible," he repeated, "because this case as it has been stated to us contains perfectly irreconcilable elements which no explanation possibly could cover. To reach any explanation at all, therefore, it is necessary to eliminate some of those elements."

​"Which would you eliminate?" Max demanded.

"The shots," McAdams returned somewhat pompously, seeing that he had Hereford's attention. "It is perfectly plain that if there had been anybody in the room at the time Baraka fired his shots that person could not have got out afterward. Nevertheless, there had been at some time somebody in the room, for the emerald was stolen."

"There iss also the blood," Max offered.

"Not more blood," said McAdams, "than might have been shed by someone who had accidentally hurt himself in the dark against one of the sharp corners of the box."

"What do you think of that, Max?" Hereford inquired smiling.

"It abbears to me," Max Schimmel replied, staring at McAdams in amazement, ​"that Mr. McAdams, hafing no ideas at all of his own upon the subject, iss breparing now to discard efen those few ideas which others haf been able to gif him."

McAdams scrutinized Max intently for several moments, then turned to Hereford.

"So," the detective went on more pompously still, "we will agree to eliminate these shots, as they could not possibly have been fired in the way Baraka has told it. We will say that Baraka was asleep when the emerald was stolen and that he continued to sleep while the thief made his escape. But Baraka was undoubtedly greatly disturbed and continually uneasy over the safety of the emerald. It is allowable to imagine, therefore, that later he awoke and not knowing it was already gone, and imagining that someone was even then making an attempt ​upon it, he discharged his revolver in the dark. Of course, when he found that the emerald really had been taken, it would be impossible to convince him afterward that he had not actually heard the thief. We have now, merely by interpolating a certain amount of time between the theft and the firing of the shots, made an explanation of the affair seem more possible, and we ought to begin our examination by inquiring who could possibly have known how to open the box."

"But," Max urged in astonishment, "it seems to me that to awake in the night and fire a revolver at nothings—that iss a strange thing for anybody to do!"

"No," McAdams defended. "For a precisely similar affair had occurred only the night before, and recollection of that, per​haps, is what put me on the right track in this matter. A foreigner—a Jap—rooming in a North Side boarding house, fired four shots from a revolver in the night. The police were summoned and found he had fired at nothing at all—only excited because he was in a strange country and imagined that some one was trying to get into his room."

McAdams now plainly appeared to have roused Max Schimmel's admiration. The little German threw himself back in his chair and raised his hands.

"Ach!" he exclaimed. "What a wonderful thing iss the mindt of a great detective! He remembers efen the least thing—efen so small a thing as this foreigner that fires at nothings! And why? Because sometime be that fact will prove to him useful. ​But no! I mistake! A great detective would haf remembered also the address of this foreigner. But Mr. McAdams says only 'a North Side boarding house'; so I would bet efen a dollar he does not know that address."

"You lose," said McAdams with a smile of gratified vanity; and gave the address.

Max pressed a silver dollar hard down upon the table cloth in front of McAdams with his thumb.

"You think, Max—" Hereford inquired curiously.

"The Javanese hass told the truth," Max Schimmel asserted with a contemptuous look at McAdams—"the emerald hass been stolen—Mr. McAdams, with his exblanations, iss a great dunderhead—and I haf bought ​something with my dollar that iss worth hafing!"

To their surprise he got up almost immediately and left them.

VIII

MR. McADAMS CONVERSES WITH TWO STRANGERS

Detective McAdams remained at the Tonty to carry on his investigation, after Hereford had left him.

As at six o'clock that night eighteen hours would have passed since the disappearance of the Surakarta, the six o'clock editions of the evening papers—which appeared on the street between two and three in the afternoon—made mention of this fact significantly. Those papers which boasted a socialistic tendency hinted already that the failure of the police was due to the wealth of the persons concerned; otherwise, in their ​opinion, the authorities would at least have removed the plaster from the walls and ceiling of the room and taken up enough of the flooring to have established the impossibility of a concealed outlet. The more sensational journals, which as an excuse for printing many columns about crimes of all sorts assumed toward all crimes an analytical attitude, gave elaborate descriptions of the room in which they enumerated even the baggage and articles of clothing of the Javanese. Papers of a conservative sort contented themselves with remarking that a room which after eighteen hours of study had failed to reveal to the police any means of outlet would not be likely to show one at all.

Detective McAdams bought all of these papers as soon as they appeared on the streets. As McAdams had already deter​mined to his full satisfaction which was the easiest of the chairs in the lobby, and as he already had twice had his shoes shined, with that enjoyment in the process which is felt only by the man with an expense account who is well paid by the day, the detective, after glancing at the headlines, carried the papers into the bar for a more deliberate perusal. He had read carefully through them all and had again taken up the first one to re-read, when the two remaining seats at his small table were taken by two men. McAdams, while pretending to continue his reading, attentively inspected these new neighbors over the top of his paper.

The larger of the two men he placed without difficulty. The bar of the Tonty all day had been crowded with reporters, plain-clothes men, curiosity seekers and rounders, ​and plainly this man belonged to the latter class. Among the many florid gentlemen of his kind who were present, he was remarkable only as being more florid, more smiling, larger and giving even more plainly than the rest the impression that he was well acquainted with the downtown district between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. But the smaller of the two McAdams could not place. Of compact and muscular build, he had the dress, the bearing and the ease that the detective associated only with city breeding.

"I tell you, Lund," this man remarked as soon as they were seated, "They're on the wrong track in that investigation upstairs."

McAdams, with his eyes upon his paper, noted that the name of the larger man was Lund.

​"Something," this smaller man asserted, "has been overlooked."

"Not if you mean in the room," said McAdams, laying down his paper.

Both turned and stared at McAdams appraisingly, as though resenting his intrusion.

"Then you have seen the room?" the first speaker demanded, satisfied by his inspection.

"I am sufficiently acquainted with the room," said McAdams guardedly, "to be certain that the newspaper accounts are correct and that there was no means of exit."

"However, I was not referring just now to the room but to the persons implicated."

"What persons?" McAdams asked.

"Whom do the police now suspect?"

"They find it impossible, I believe, to ​suspect any one," McAdams replied. "Because there are only two persons who could have had any possible information as to how to open the box and the police are obliged to admit that neither of these could have taken the emerald."

The detective's interlocutor smiled appreciatively and slapped his hand lightly on the table.

"Among the persons implicated in this affair," he said impressively, "there must necessarily be some one for whom that admission of innocence need not be made. The necessity is to locate that person. My own interest in the matter, of course you understand, is purely mental. My name is Du Brock—my friend's name Lund. I am one of those people who cannot bear to see a matter which offers an intricate and fasci​nating intellectual problem ignorantly bungled. You, no doubt, share my conviction that the police have courted failure through confining their examinations too narrowly to the room itself; for I see that you have taken some pains to become conversant with the case."

He pointed to the newspaper on the table.

"Probably," he then went on, "you are much better informed as to the particulars than I am. So if you will enumerate to me the persons whom the police might possibly suspect, perhaps between us we can shed some light upon the problem."

McAdams hesitated and looked searchingly at his companions. Then he reflected that he was not known to them and was under no necessity of giving them his name.

"I believe," he said, with deep interest, ​"the suspicions of the police first fell on Baraka. It was believed, because of the complete impossibility of the robbery as he told it, that Baraka himself might have made way with the jewel. That was at once investigated and disproved."

"By evidence of Baraka's devotion to the Soesoehoenan?"

"By that, and by the immense personal misfortunes likely to be suffered by Baraka through the disappearance of the stone. Baraka has twice needed a physician today and the doctor says that his prostration cannot be assumed."

"We will grant, then, that Baraka has been faithful to the Soesoehoenan and that he has not been tempted by its value to make away with the jewel," Du Brock admitted after reflection. "However, we must still ​inquire whether he cannot have made away with it for some other reason."

"It is hard to imagine any other reason."

"Very, for in fact I can think of only one. Baraka may have suspected that an attempt to steal the stone was planned by one of his attendants. He would very likely, in that case, take summary vengeance upon the unfaithful one after the oriental custom. He would, I feel sure, at once shoot the man he had reason to suspect. Let us imagine, in that case, Baraka's position. He is in a strange land and unacquainted with its laws. At the same time he cannot help but know that an execution of that sort would not pass unchallenged in this country. He must have known that he himself would be arrested and obliged to account for his act. Necessarily his arrest would separate him ​from the emerald which was in his charge. The hotel already has been aroused by his shots. Under such circumstances Baraka in an agony of anxiety may have hastily concealed the body of his attendant, taken the jewel from the box and concealed it on his person until he should have an opportunity to give it to Miss Regan, and accounted for the disturbance he had made and the condition of his room by claiming to have been robbed by a thief."

McAdams considered this. "In that case," he remarked, "the number of persons in the Javanese suite would today be reduced by one."

"Yes. Is that the case?"

"No; for all those who arrived last night—and these were the only ones—have been examined today by the police."

​Du Brock and Lund looked at one another and nodded as though satisfied.

"We must take up, then, the next who might be suspected," Du Brock observed.

"You have already mentioned them," McAdams replied. "The suspicions of the police fell next—or at least their investigations next concerned—Baraka's attendants individually, in spite of Baraka's protestations that all seven of them are almost fanatically devoted to himself and chosen by him for that reason."

"Baraka's word is not sufficient for that; for he may be mistaken."

"He is absolutely certain also that none of them knew how to open the box."

"Again, his certainty, even on that subject, is not sufficient."

"Also, none of them could have been in ​the room, or he would have been found there when the door was broken open."

"A third time still, that is not sufficient; for that must have been equally true of whoever took the stone—yet the stone, as we know, was taken and no one was found there."

McAdams thought for several moments. "Certainly," he said at last, "among seven men all selected for their fidelity you will not claim that a universal conspiracy could be possible. Whatever the reason or the inducement, some—if only one—of those seven would have remained faithful; and the whereabouts of all seven at the time this robbery occurred is accounted for by all the others. For they all give evidence that, at the time of the robbery, they were all in the outer rooms of the Javanese suite and the ​doors between these outer rooms were open so that they could not be mistaken. The evidence of the presence of each one is exact, circumstantial and corroborated by all the others, which it could not be unless all were telling the truth or all had conspired together."

"I am satisfied it is true then," Du Brock agreed. Lund also gave his concurrence and asked: "Who is the next one implicated?"

"The others whose names have been connected with the case," McAdams answered, "are, first, the Soesoehoenan who would certainly have done nothing to interfere with a bargain he had been to so much trouble to carry out, and, even if he did, would have been under no necessity to arrange for the stealing of his own emerald; Miss Regan, who was equally under no necessity for steal​ing it, since she had only to wait a few hours for it to be presented to her; and Mr. Hereford, who could not have stolen it if he had wished. With so capricious a young lady as Miss Regan, whom we may imagine to be somewhat more in love with the emerald than with the Soesoehoenan, no doubt some very ingenious theories may be manufactured to show that she had a hand in the disappearance of the stone; but none of those theories are even possible in the circumstances of the case."

"I am quite content to admit that neither Miss Regan nor the Soesoehoenan can have anything to do with it," Du Brock conceded. "And there is no one else whom it is possible to suspect in the case?"

"No one," McAdams admitted; "and at ​the same time the complete innocence of all these may be said to be proved."

Du Brock stretched himself in his chair and appeared to be thoughtfully inspecting the ceiling. Lund looked intently into his glass.

"Is Mr. Hereford in love with Miss Regan?" Du Brock demanded abruptly.

"No; he is concerned in this matter only as her trustee."

"Mr. Hereford is a very clever man, I understand."

"Mr. Hereford is a very brilliant man," McAdams corroborated; "but even if he had been clever and brilliant enough to devise some scheme by which he was able to enter and leave the room under the circumstances in this case, he would not have been able to open the box. Those who have seen the box​—except Miss Regan and Baraka—have seen at once that it could not be opened by anyone who had received no instruction beyond watching it opened once by someone else, which was all Hereford had done."

"I will admit that," Du Brock agreed, "provided there had been no previous opportunity for preparation. Otherwise I would prefer not to forget that we are dealing in this case with a highly educated and able man brought in contact with a mechanism, complicated enough no doubt, but devised in an age of slower and less definite thinking. There are, if newspaper accounts have stated it right, some millions of different ways in which the levers of the box can be manipulated; at the same time, there are—again if the newspaper reports are correct—only four figures each with a head and two ​hands. Do you hold the opinion that, provided Mr. Hereford had been able to obtain some previous knowledge of the arrangement of the box, it would have been impossible for him to provide himself with some memory system, or key, in letters or in figures, which would have enabled him to memorize the eighteen necessary manipulations?"

Du Brock and Lund waited inquiringly for McAdams to reply, but the detective only glared at them angrily.

"Also," Du Brock continued, when it became evident McAdams was not going to speak, "I personally would prefer not to forget that Mr. Hereford has at his command all the engines of modern business. There is, if I am not misinformed, cable communication with Java. Do you think it impossible for Mr. Hereford, if he doubted his ​ability to get all the information needed in his one visit, to have supplemented the information to be gained in that way by convincing the Soesoehoenan, through misuse of Baraka's name, that Baraka was having trouble in opening the box and needed further instructions by cable?"

McAdams continued to glare at them with a resentfulness which showed the professional impossibility of his suspecting Hereford so long as he was in Hereford's pay.

"You gentlemen are acquainted with Mr. Hereford—either of you?" he demanded belligerently.

"We have not that pleasure," Du Brock answered.

"Then perhaps you will tell me what your interest may be in making such ridiculous ​suppositions to get Mr. Hereford suspected?"

"You mistake," said Du Brock serenely, "We have no animus against Mr. Hereford, and our interest in the case is only that which we have stated."

McAdams fiercely swept up his newspapers and left them. His first impulse was to report at once to Hereford the two busybodies who were apparently spreading the impression that he must have taken the emerald. His second thought prompted him that it might not be well for himself to have Hereford know that he had engaged freely in conversation about the case with casual strangers.

He finally called Hereford up and made an appointment with him at his rooms for that evening.

IX

MR. HEREFORD ENTERTAINS MISS REGAN

Wade Hereford, after an extraordinarily busy afternoon, the incidents and interviews of which were quite out of the ordinary course of business in a Chicago banking office, took an automobile to his apartments on the North Side. He had a five-room suite in a large and fashionable apartment building near Lincoln Park, looking, from his windows upon one of the upper floors, across the park to the lake.

Hereford, who when he dined at home, usually had his table set either in the restaurant on the first floor or in the roof garden, almost equally well could be served from the ​restaurant in his own dining room and waited upon by his man. There he took dinner alone this evening. He refused the newspaper reporters who, in turn and en masse, demanded over the house telephone to see him; and half an hour later he sent his man to refuse to converse with the city editors over the city 'phone. He excused himself to the four or five of his friends and twice as many of his acquaintances, curious about it all, who dropped in or telephoned; but these interruptions made his dinner progress slowly, and he was not through until after eight o'clock.

He selected an after dinner cigar, lit his reading lamp, and from force of habit, took a book. He could not read, however.

Presently, stooping to a low shelf under his table, he pulled out a thick book of tough ​paper pasted three-quarters full of newspaper clippings. As he laid it upon the table it flew open to a Sunday newspaper's colored half-page portrait of his ward in vivid costume.

He drew back angrily at sight of it and with hands behind his back paced up and down the rug until his cigar was half gone. Coming back to the table then as abruptly as he had spun away from it, he sat down and, holding the book upon his knees, turned page after page proclaiming the many adventures, risks, proclamations and other doings of Lorine Regan—all illustrated. Here and there he stopped and read carefully some considerable section of the text accompanying the pictures; but over most of the clippings he stopped only long enough to recall ​the nature of the adventure it chronicled—then he turned on.

Wade Hereford knew his ward mostly through this book. Thirty months before, when he had found himself the only one who could be considered responsible for the girl, he had subscribed—during his first vain efforts to check her—to a clipping service for all published information about her doings, which he had pasted here and kept. Its pages now recalled the curiously personal, almost romantic interest she had had at first for him; the long expostulatory letters he had written her in the beginning. Once or twice, here in his rooms, when some of his friends had happened upon the book—for he had never deliberately shown it—he had laughed with them over its startling pictures and its impertinent comment. They had ​come to mean to him by then—in his disappointment and anger over her—only the successive mad acts of a headstrong, foolish child. He was not quite certain what they meant to him tonight. But he could find no blanket explanation to cover them now, and he asked himself what he had seen in her which made it so.

He had been prepared for her caprice, for her self-will. He had not been at all prepared for that something else, which these pictures seemed to desecrate. Tonight they angered him because they looked so like her and yet had failed to catch that something which he himself had seen. He hastily put away the book, as he heard a knock upon his outer door and a woman's voice inquiring for him in his reception room.

He listened, heard no other voice except ​that of his man, and flushed with annoyance which he told himself was only that of the trustee—that she should have come alone.

He halted at the door of his reception room, relieved by his first glimpse of her which seemed to tell him that she had stopped only for a moment on her way to some evening entertainment. But he was perplexed and dazed by his second and longer look, for which he was now suddenly certain she had been fully prepared. He felt the conviction, for which he could in no way account, that she was expected nowhere and had dressed in this way for him. Since the only other time he had seen her she had been in a simple dress of gray, she wished now, for some purpose of her own, that he should see her in evening dress. Jewels blazed at her throat and hair; her beauty by the change ​had become opulent and rare. He sought swiftly for some explanation of her purpose in this; but in his knowledge of his ward he found no clew to that or to the meaning of her present manner.

She controlled herself with difficulty to answer his greeting in a tone like his own; but now, as she advanced toward him, she was rather pale and her small hand clutched tightly about her the cloak that had slipped from her white shoulders.

"When my father found he had underrated—or overrated—a man's ability," she began evenly, "he told him so; it was the only kind of apology my father ever made."

Hereford smiled.

"I remember that as a characteristic of your father."

"It is also mine. I thought, Mr. Hereford, ​that an emerald which had been kept in safety for six hundred years among an intriguing and savage people, to whom it represented not only wealth but power, could be kept with equal safety for twenty-four hours in Chicago, where it had only an intrinsic value. I find I was mistaken; that I underrated and had formed a wholly false idea of your ability from my correspondence with you. Now that I have admitted that, does that satisfy you?"

"I do not understand," said Hereford honestly. His pulses were progressively quickening as he watched her here in these rooms of his, which never before had known a woman's presence. Why had she come? For the first time he noted in her eyes the same concentration of purpose he had seen so often in the eyes of Matthew Regan when ​determinedly pitted against a feared adversary.

"However, I make it quite plain, I think."

"Not quite," he deliberately forced her on.

She bit her lip, which whitened under her small teeth. "You are ungenerous. Yesterday, when you threatened to prevent me from receiving the emerald, I answered you with—with a sort of challenge, did I not?"

He studied her. "Exactly."

"To-day I withdraw that challenge, Mr. Hereford. If what I said yesterday has piqued you into doing something which otherwise you would not have done, I——"

She flushed painfully; but he did not feel that sense of triumph which comes to a man in the presence of a woman who concedes something against her will, which is not ​aroused by any other form of contest. He noted, quite coldly and speculatively, it seemed to him, the changes of her face and skin and her deliberate and, he thought, simulated frankness.

"You mean you wish me to put aside my pique and consider, in what might be called a normal state of mind, what I have done?" he inquired evenly.

She nodded.

"Very well. I have considered."

"Then tell me what difference your consideration has made."

"None. I have done nothing yesterday or today or last night, as you seem to think"—he smiled—"that I would not do again now after hearing what you just have said."

"At least," she said, pale and looking steadily at him, "you will not deny to me ​that you have the emerald? It is perhaps flattery to myself to believe that you got up your extremely effective campaign to learn the secret of the box, and afterward planned some still more clever method of taking the stone, solely to oppose me; but, from whatever motive you acted, the action itself can scarcely be questioned. There are only two possible explanations of the disappearance of the emerald. You know them both."

"Still I would like to hear them."

"Only two persons—yourself and Baraka—could possibly get into the box. Baraka tells me there is a total of seventy-two manipulations, eighteen of which must be chosen and performed in their right order to raise the cover. The complete impossibility of any one's hitting by chance upon the correct eighteen in the correct order proves per​fectly who it was that opened the box last night—even without that!" She pointed to his bandaged hand.

"If it is proved," he said with the same noncommittal smile, "there is no use in my denying it."

She drew back, while he watched her closely. He wondered whether it was real perplexity that wrinkled her smooth forehead.

"You have seen Baraka?" she asked at last.

His eyes flashed comprehendingly. "Won't you sit down, Miss Regan?" he said in a conventional tone. "This conversation is stretching to a length I never expected." Then he placed a chair for her with his uninjured hand; but she completely ​disregarded his action and only repeated her question.

"You have seen Baraka?"

"I see no harm in telling you," he said after an instant's consideration, "that Baraka and myself appear to be upon the closest terms of social intercourse. I called upon him twice yesterday; he called upon me twice this morning. I returned his calls about noon and he paid me another visit at three o'clock this afternoon at my office."

"And the object of this last visit?"

"Some remarks of a friend of mine—a naturalist—Max Schimmel, whose name fails to conceal his nationality, appear to have removed Baraka's last doubts, if he had any, as to what has become of the emerald."

"Then he came to request you to return it?"

​"That was what I gathered from his somewhat excited conversation."

"Within how many hours?"

"Miss Regan—really you should have studied for the bar," he said quietly. "Don't think I am impertinent or am mocking at you when I say that your faculty of cross-questioning is an unusual ability either in man or woman."

She paid no heed to the interruption. "Within how many hours?" she repeated imperatively.

"To tell the truth I have forgotten his exact words; but the time set falls, I believe, about seven o'clock tomorrow night."

"In default of which—?"

He made no answer. She studied him long and impersonally, and in her fixed scrutiny he seemed to detect dimly a new respect.

​"Mr. Hereford, I have been disingenuous with you," she said at last, with a note of sincerity which now he could not doubt. "I know why Baraka visited your office this afternoon and what the very private message was he left there with you; for Baraka himself sent me word of it quite frankly. Don't you understand that that is why I came here tonight? Baraka gave you, as you have said, something over twenty-four hours in which to return the emerald; in default of which he assured you of your death. He left upon your desk when he went away a knife as witness of his purpose and the method. You see—I do know."

"Yes; you seem to have the facts," Hereford returned.

"But his threat did not frighten you?"

"It did not find me mentally unprepared. ​I suspected, this noon, when I saw that Baraka had changed halfway from the European clothing in which I saw him first to the native jacket—the cabaya, I believe it is called in your future country—that in his bewilderment and terror he had reverted to primeval ways in more than dress alone. I expected to receive some such message. However, Miss Regan, we are not in Java. We are in Chicago, where, surrounded by a strong and reasonably efficient force of police, assassination is not easily carried out."

She came nearer impulsively.

"I hope you are not counting upon that in your refusal to return the emerald?"

He smiled again quietly.

"No; for the circumstances of the case, ​Miss Regan, make it quite impossible for me to return the emerald."

"Mr. Hereford," she said earnestly and eagerly, "you do not know these men. I myself have just seen Baraka. Rulogi, one of the most devoted of his servants, has gone from him. Rulogi is instructed to keep watch of you and, I have no doubt, to carry out his master's threat at the appointed time if any steps you take prevent Baraka himself from performing it. Rulogi would be absolutely reckless of any consequences to himself—a Malay running amuck against you. Consider, too, that if by any chance news of this has reached the Soesoehoenan today, and Baraka hears that the sultan has been killing one or two of his children, or a wife, as an indication of what further will happen if Baraka cannot recover the emerald, he ​may not even await the time he himself appointed."

"The Soesoehoenan may be killing Baraka's children—that interesting and attractive gentleman, as you described him to me yesterday?" Hereford asked caustically. "And the Soesoehoenan would not regard this as a possible objection on your part to marrying him?"

"You misunderstand me," she said with sudden coldness.

"I beg pardon then."

"I did not say the Soesoehoenan would be killing Baraka's children. I said merely that word might come to Baraka that it was being done—the effect of which would be the same for you."

"For Baraka, if now I understand you rightly, being on close terms with the Soesoe​hoenan, would find nothing necessarily unconvincing in such news?"

She seemed to change before his eyes, losing suddenly this strange, new, earnest manner of hers which had surprised and held him. She drew the opera cloak over her shoulders.

"I did not think you would quibble with me," she said angrily; "and since that is the case I will not keep the friends who came here with me waiting any longer."

The sudden change in her angered and pained him—he did not know why.

"Your visit does not seem to have accomplished much," he could not resist saying.

"I have freed myself from any responsibility for the danger you run," she returned promptly. "Since nothing I can say appears to have any effect on you, I do not care what ​motives make you resolved to keep the emerald. For you understand, of course, Mr. Hereford, that I consider you to have interfered in an affair which concerns only myself in a manner uncalled for and unwarranted even by your trusteeship in my estate. I hope you also understand that my only reason for coming here was to clear my conscience of blame for your fate; and that is fully cleared now, since you have forced me to lower myself to apologize and request in order to mock at me."

He frowned perplexedly. Had she really come here, as she had said, only to make plain his peril to him? Or had she come, as he all along had thought, to scare from him—if he had it—the stone, the loss of which was endangering her defiant plan?

"If I thought—" he began hesitatingly. ​

"You mean you think I resemble him also in that?"
Page 157

​But she flashed upon him the daring, adventurous smile of the girl who, to shock the discreet world that refused her, was to marry the Malay Sultan of Java; and his anger rose as she moved toward the door.

"Miss Regan," he said, "you began this interview with a reference to your father. Let me end it in the same way. In spite of your father's private generosity, I never knew him openly to yield a point, as you would have me think you just have done, except to gain some subsequent advantage for himself. Great as are my gratitude and respect for him, I know this to have been the case."

Her eyes flashed angrily now.

"You mean you think I resemble him also in that?"

"That is it."

​Then he closed the door behind her as she went out.

From the door, he crossed quickly to the window to see her leaving the building. He told himself it was merely to see whether, as she had said, she had come with companions or alone. A man and a woman—the woman certainly middle-aged—left the building and entered the motor waiting in the street. He waited with some impatience at the window to see Lorine leave.

Wade Hereford seeing other men he knew fall in love and marry, had sometimes asked himself why, after his youthful, brief but wide experience of women, they had suddenly lost interest for him. He had told himself it was because he had found his chief pleasure in contest. It must be, he thought, that he had found the contest too easy with ​a sex taught from earliest infancy that its chief duty is to love—which therefore is vanquished from the beginning. He had laid to this the strange piquancy that he had found at all times in his relations with his ward. She—at least it appeared to him—was not to be classed among those women who ask only to be loved; for she defied all men—himself most particularly—as openly and frankly as she appeared also in all other ways to defy convention. In their correspondence she usually had had the better of it; and he felt now that she had bested him in the only two personal interviews he ever had had with her.

He flushed as he recollected that in both these interviews, he—whose reputation was that he never lost his temper—had ended with being furiously and impotently angry ​with her. Even now he was conscious of a continuance of that impatience with her as he still stood at the window waiting to see her pass from the building. For she had not yet appeared; and, as he looked up and down the street he saw no vehicle for her. It was now later in the evening than the time when most pedestrians were upon the street and when the motorcars bound for the theatres were passing.

Hereford could count the walking figures that crossed under the street lamps. On the other side of the street and nearly opposite the spot where the motor had disappeared, he noticed the tall figure of a man appear and vanish, appear and glance about, and again retreat. With an unconscious quickening of the pulse, Hereford turned out the light behind him and went back to the win​dow. The same figure, always keeping in the darker shadows, could just be seen. Hereford's impulse was to rush down and see the man; next he thought it would be enough to send his man down to determine whether the watcher were a Javanese. The return of curiosity concerning Lorine replaced both these impulses. She had not left the building; he was certain of it; why had she not? With a fresh cigar bitten tight between his teeth, he settled himself at his window, watching.

X

MISS REGAN INQUIRES AFTER HER ESTATE

It was some fifteen minutes later, and Mr. Wade Hereford, with his cigar smoked down now to a short cold stub, was still leaning upon the window-sill, searching the street in the expectation that his ward would soon appear, when his man—usually the most austere and imperturbable of English manservants,—approached him timidly.

"I beg pardon, sir," the man said uneasily, "but will you be requiring me this evening?"

Hereford looked at the servant with understanding. The man was shifting his weight disturbedly from one foot to the ​other and foolishly flushing. Such disturbance of equanimity, Hereford had noted, had begun with the appearance of a bright-cheeked colleen in the service of the people across the hallway. It was probably about the hour, Hereford reckoned, for the second show to commence at some nearby nickel theatre.

"No; I intend to be in this evening," he dismissed the man. "I expect no one except Mr. McAdams."

Hereford wondered grimly, would his friends ever see in himself such strange, irrational disturbances? The man, upon his release, had taken himself away swiftly. Five minutes later Hereford heard the house telephone bell which was now ringing again. Going to the telephone, he found the doorman calling him.

​"Miss Regan, sir, in the public reception room, wishes you to come down a moment to speak with her."

Hereford with a surprising mixture of irritation and pleasure, hurried immediately down.

"I have been forced by your stubbornness to change my plans, you see," she met him easily as he advanced to her.

"Yes?" he said, in doubt.

"I have sent my friends on. The matter immediately before us now is so entirely a conventional one between ward and trustee, that it was scarcely necessary to detain them. I was right in believing that you meant to spend the evening at home—I mean that you have no engagement?"

Hereford inclined his head. "You are correct. I was to be at home only for Mc​Adams; he, of course, can wait when he comes." He studied her. The same cool, tantalising aloofness and unconcern over him which had characterized their first interview appeared to possess her again.

"Then it will not greatly trespass upon your time to take me to your office this evening. I presume you preserve there the documents concerning my estate."

"You mean your securities or your accounts?" Hereford asked.

"Both."

"The accounts are all there and many of the securities in my safe there also, though some are not."

"But those that are there are all accessible to you at any time?"

"Yes," Hereford admitted. "Of course, it would be far more convenient for myself​—for both of us, I should imagine, to go over them in the morning."

"You are mistaken. It is far more important for me—in fact it is quite necessary for me to see them now, at once," the girl insisted.

"Very well," Hereford agreed. "Of course, I do not myself attend to all the details of your accounts. However, I believe I can probably reach one of my bookkeepers by telephone who will meet us at the office and make any point clear to you."

"That isn't necessary," Lorine protested. "I want to see only—the general securities," she said vaguely.

Hereford gazed at her. "I see," he nodded and telephoned to his rooms before he remembered his man had gone out. He himself went up for his hat and coat. Obvi​ously, he reflected, no mere desire for an immediate view of her securities was at the bottom of Lorine's demand. What her real purpose was he could not determine to himself. Whether she imagined that he had the Surakarta in his safe or some other concealment in his office which he must expose to her if displaying her securities; whether she expected in some way to obtain the stone from him alone, should she succeed in finding it, he could only guess. Though, outwardly, she was the soul of coolness and unconcern as he rejoined her, he was conscious that constantly she betrayed, subtly, the sense of some covert purpose. During his absence, she had ordered a taxicab. Sitting beside him on their way through the city, she neither avoided nor tried to make small talk. She, indeed, seemed to be watching him to ​anticipate his next move as he was acutely aware he was watching her and knew she was aware of it.

A single elevator was still running in the building at the top of which he had his offices; they ascended swiftly and he unlocked his door. He switched on the lights and the strangeness of having her there with him in his office, where so large a part of his time had been spent in thought and worry over her and her affairs, was increased by her evening dress. But on her part, there was no sign of any feeling of unusualness in her business there. She seated herself at his request while he opened the vault at the side of the room and brought to the desk in the center several bundles of envelopes and a couple of ledgers.

"Here," he indicated, opening a page, ​"are the lists of securities and other property which came under my management at your father's death. Through these pages you may trace easily, I believe, the sale, transfer or funding at maturity of those securities not now held by me for you; here you may make out, I believe, the changes in investments or the additional investments made by me. These," he touched the packets of envelopes, "contain certain securities which I have occasion to keep here; the others kept elsewhere are listed on these pages. Do you wish me to go over them with you, item by item; or do you prefer to study them by yourself?"

Lorine drew her chair beside the desk. "Thank you, I believe I will be able to make out enough for myself."

"Very well," He left her alone at the desk. Busying himself with some letters on ​his secretary's table, he observed that Lorine, in settling herself before the books, was no less resolutely—and obviously—busying herself with them. He had left the doors of his vault standing open on purpose. She had not yet betrayed the least interest in that direction. He stepped from his office into the next and closed the door behind him. The partition was wood set with frosted glass through which it was not possible for him to see into his own office; but, from the position of the light over his desk, he knew he must see upon the frosted glass Lorine's shadow if she left the desk to move toward the vault. But she did not move.

Listening, while he waited, he heard a man's step pass in the hall outside. That, in itself, was not significant as a few of the other offices upon the floor often were used in ​the evening. Another step passed. In comparison with the other, it made clearer Hereford's suspicion of that first tread which had caught his attention. The second was the tread of a man hurrying home late from his office; the first had seemed more to simulate it. He continued to listen and heard it again—the step of the first man; and now this one seemed to slow his step as he passed the door. Had Lorine's plan depended upon her meeting at his office some aide of hers who was to come in at her signal?

Hereford hastily opened the door to the hall. Past him and going toward the elevators, he saw a tall man whose figure immediately struck him as familiar. Puzzling to place the man, he was uncertain until—just before the turn of the hallway took the man away—the other glanced back. Not his ​face—for Hereford could not see clearly whether the man was white or a Javanese—but the manner of his half turning about, instantly recalled to Hereford the tall man always keeping in the shadow whom he had studied in the street below his apartment half an hour before. Again, as when he saw him before, Hereford's impulse was to follow; but recalling Lorine in the next room, he hurried back.

Whether, in the moment during which the recognition of the figure in the hall had thrown him off guard, Lorine had improved the opportunity to look behind the doors of his vault, he could not know. He found her just as he left her, interestedly, half quizzically going over the items of the lists he put before her. So far from noticing any ​change in her, it was she who commented upon a disturbance in him.

"What is it?" she asked coolly. "Is anything wrong?"

He endeavored to match her manner. "I am sorry," he said, "if by my precipitateness I have frightened off your friend in the hall. I came here quite alone with you—entirely without making appointments with the police or others here—for the purpose of encouraging you to put into action any plan you had made. Believe me, I am sorry if I have prevented it going further."

She gazed at him fairly. "I don't understand you," she said.

He dismissed the matter. "What progress are you making with the books?" he inquired.

​He saw her glance at the desk clock before she answered. "Rather good, I think."

"I see; so you will soon be through?"

"I believe so," she answered, applying herself again to her task. He stayed in the room with her now, again occupying himself at the other desk. Listening he could not make out the tread of the tall man in the hall. But there was now, in Lorine's manner, almost a noticeable tension. She questioned him now and then upon details of the accounts before her; but much more definitely than before,—she was waiting. He caught her glance again at the desk-clock. Something in her manner now started a different suspicion through him. He leaned forward and drew toward him the telephone. Lorine turned at his movement and observed ​him. He called the number of the telephone at his apartment.

"This is Mr. Hereford," he announced himself, as he got the connection. "Is that you, George?" he named his man. "Who is this?" he demanded.

The man at the other end, surely not George, was in great confusion. There were sounds of other men's voices and men moving about. "It's himself, Mr. Hereford, sergeant," Hereford made out the voice of the man who had answered, calling another.

"Hello! Hello! there, sor!" a voice in authority replaced the first at the other end of the wire. "Is that Mr. Hereford?"

"Yes," Hereford replied guardedly.

"Well, we've been looking for you the city over, sor! This is the police—Sergeant Lafferty. Your flat's just been robbed. Gone ​through, sor. The divil of a uptur-rnin' they've given it; and got away. We was looking for ye to notify ye, sor."

"Very well, I understand," Hereford returned; and hung up the receiver. So the purpose of Lorine's evening excursion was accomplished! She had taken him there to ensure the thorough search of his rooms! And, as he turned from the telephone, very readily she sensed it. She shut the books and arose.

"I am keeping you too long," she apologized. "You have been very patient. Now I will let you go."

"Thank you," he said dryly.

She drew her cloak closer about her; he opened the door and, almost without interchange of a word, they descended to the street.

​"You wish to return to your hotel, I presume?" he questioned then.

"Please," she requested.

They drove a few blocks in silence.

"Good night," he bowed, formally as he left her before the hotel elevators.

"Good night," she acknowledged, as formally.

XI

MAX HAS CHANGED HIS LODGINGS

The taxicab brought Hereford swiftly to his apartment building. The doorman met him at the curb, all excitement, all explanatory; the manager of the building, more suave, met him at the door. The police appeared rather impartially distributed all about. His man had returned before him and had at once set himself inventorying to discover what had been taken. McAdams, who had arrived soon after Hereford's departure and therefore was waiting below when the disturbance in the apartment was first reported, was consequently the first on ​the ground and the most obstinate about leaving.

"I am convinced," the detective reviewed the case in his consultation with Hereford after the rest had gone, "that the object of this invasion was not ordinary robbery. Owing to the fact that you have not yet discovered anything missing—though everything has been disturbed—I feel that I am confirmed in my first opinion that this search is a direct result of the complications over the loss of the Surakarta."

"I should think so," Hereford granted wearily.

"Beyond question," McAdams continued, "the search was made to discover if had the Surakarta in your possession in this place. The thieves evidently planned this carefully and well. They came up the fire-​escape, apparently, and after exhausting every possible concealment, they took themselves off the same way. From the thoroughness with which they have gone through everything, there must have been several of them * * *" McAdams went on and on, ponderously. Hereford, his own speculations possessing him, lacked the requisite energy to rid himself of his representative. Yet he was relieved when, answering a ring at the house telephone, he heard Max's voice; and, in a moment, the little German came up.

With the calmness of one who had the event adequately described to him before and who had determined in his mind that the described event was a phenomenon of only passing interest, Max surveyed the confusion which Hereford's man was only beginning to put straight.

​"Come in, Max," Hereford invited.

Max, gazing about with mild curiosity, shook his head.

"No, since you are busy with Mr. McAdams. It iss nothings. I did not come to see this," he dismissed with a nod of his head the confusion which had so agitated the others. "I have heard what it iss—nothings."

"Nothing?" McAdams grunted his disgust.

"I said so," Max replied, gazing at the heavily featured man calmly.

"Then you do not see that it is connected with the search for the Surakarta?" McAdams questioned, pityingly. "I, fortunately, was on the ground when the trouble was first discovered. There is no possible question but that this is not a real robbery ​at all—that is, in the ordinary sense. It was a search made by those who believe that Mr. Hereford has the Surakarta in order to see if they could discover it here."

"That," Max replied, "iss why I said it iss nothings."

McAdams spluttered, futilely.

"You are busy," Max spoke to Hereford. "I, too, am busy and it iss late already." He looked at his watch. "I came only to tell you that in case you want me I haf changed my address."

"You're not giving up your present quarters, Max?" Hereford asked good-naturedly.

"No—no; you misunderstand. It iss only I, not my family; and for the time only."

He looked again at McAdams, doubtfully, ​but seemed to reassure himself. "Just now," he concluded, "I lif here on your North Side—yes, in the very next room but one to that foreigner who, as Mr. McAdams has told us, fired pistols at nothings in the night before the Surakarta wass stolen."

He went out again as briskly as he had entered.

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